On Jan. 19, millions of users got a taste of what short-form video would be like without TikTok. Other platforms saw floods of new users and upticks in traffic–even platforms without a direct TikTok competitor, like Tumblr.
But do competitors like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels actually have the oomph to pick up where TikTok would have left off?
Well, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower, they’re far behind TikTok when it comes to how much time they’re able to get users to spend actually scrolling through short-form content.
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When users have TikTok’s app open, they’re spending 55% of their time watching short-form videos, Sensor Tower found in its State of Mobile report covering data from the past 12 months.
Compare that to Instagram, where users spend 37% of their time watching Reels, and YouTube, where viewers spend 26% of their time watching Shorts. On Facebook, it’s 21.5%, on X it’s 10.1%, and on Snapchat (which recently announced another revamped creator monetization program aimed at enticing short-form video creators) viewers spend just 9.6% of their time watching short-form content.
On Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X, and Snapchat, users instead spend the majority of their time on the platform’s main feed (Instagram, Facebook, X), on social messaging (Snapchat), or on longer-form video YouTube.
That means while all of these apps have managed to shift some viewership to short-form video, their users still come to them for their original core offerings. On Facebook and X, that’s text and photo posts from friends, family, and strangers. On Snapchat, it’s DMs (as the app loves to remind people). And YouTube, of course, is the internet’s long-reigning long-form king.
TikTok also has an edge there: its core offering has always been short-form content. And it’s worth pointing out that if YouTube were to disappear, TikTok would probably face similar issues taking its place, since internet denizens have an association between YouTube and long-form.
“TikTok is the clear leader among short-form video apps,” Sensor Tower said in the report.
At least part of TikTok’s dominance is likely due to the engrossing design of its algorithm and the increasing tendency for Gen Z (TikTok’s primary user demographic) to scroll, scroll, scroll. We don’t think it’ll lose its #1 spot anytime soon (so long as it remains unbanned on U.S. soil). What we are curious about is whether it will lose short-form video view time to shopping instead, as it continues to promote TikTok Shop in an effort to compete with ecom giants like Amazon and Temu.
